Mark Steyn's Blog, page 14

Lest We Forget

After yesterday's Remembrance Day observances at Coronation Park in Toronto, someone wrote on the Cenotaph:

CANADA WILL BURN PRAISE ALLAH

Gord Pierce of the Royal Canadian Legion denounced the vandalism as "sick" but also demonstrated the reflexive if confused multiculti prostrations which those on the receiving end of such sentiments feel obliged to make:

Pierce also said the memorial recognizes the victory in World War II, the result of which is Toronto is a city where many languages are spoken.

So there's that.

And actually the graffiti artist shows an ability to communicate in clear and admirably straightforward English that seems to be beyond those struggling to respond to him.

UPDATE: At the sharp end of the threat expressed above, here's how one of our Afghan "allies" chose to mark November 11th, in an incident that stands in forlorn contrast to the famous Christmas Eve impromptu football match between British and German troops in the Great War.

The City That Doesn't Sleep

The Great Leader in the awesome bomber jacket has moved on, but in New York your "Federal" "Emergency" "Management" tax dollars are hard at work:

A major disaster occurs on the outskirts of one of the most advanced civilizations on earth, and 10 days later there are victims walking 6 miles to find food?

Likewise:

Does this look like a photo from a first world nation?

Good thing Nanny Bloomberg resigned from the Republican Party or there might be some bad press over this.

Don't forget, for ten billion dollars, an Obama rounding error, you could have had a flood barrier. But they gave the money to the Collections Department of FEMA, so that in two years' time there'll be enough bureaucrats to hunt you down demanding their checks back.

The Consolations of Denial

With respect, the analysis below is wishful thinking. Tuesday was a profoundly consequential night (more on this in my weekend column) and to pretend that it was a "status quo" election that the incumbent merely "survived" is not helpful. J T Young writes:

Politically, Obama won without a mandate and becomes a lame duck shortly.

Are you sure he knows that? He didn't have a "mandate" for half the stuff he did in his first term, but he did it anyway - shoving Obamacare through on one last bought vote rather than focusing on jobs, etc. That's the main reason his re-election was so narrow - because he spent his first term concentrating only on things that, whatever their immediate downside, offer his team serious long-term advantage. Our guys might usefully learn from that: Too often Republicans, even when they win, are content to be in office rather than in power.

If that's what he did when he had a re-election to fight, what do you think he'll do now that he doesn't? Regardless of the "inevitable Republican gains in 2014", this is a man happy to advance his agenda through executive power supported by the bureaucracy and the courts, in neither of which is there any danger of "Republican gains". In other words, if you liked the first-term executive orders, wait till the second.

While we're at it, on the brink of another four years, the key point about Barack Obama is not that he's a secret Muslim Kenyan Commie or whatever. Whether he was born in Honolulu or Mombasa or Stockholm or up on Planet Zongo, what matters (as I write in my book) is that in his general worldview he is entirely typical and perfectly representative of tens upon tens of millions of Americans. Tuesday's majority confirmed that. They don't need a "conspiracy": They agree with him. That's the problem.

The Edge of the Abyss

Amid the ruin and rubble of the grey morning after, it may seem in poor taste to do anything so vulgar as plug the new and stunningly topical paperback edition of my book, After America -- or, as Dennis Miller retitled it on the radio the other day, Wednesday. But the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said long ago in an alternative universe, and I certainly could use a little. So I’m going to be vulgar and plug away. The central question of Wednesday -- I mean, After America -- is whether the Brokest Nation in History is capable of meaningful course correction. On Tuesday, the American people answered that question. The rest of the world will make its dispositions accordingly.

In the weeks ahead, Democrats and Republicans will reach a triumphant “bipartisan” deal to avert the fiscal cliff through some artful bookkeeping mechanism that postpones Taxmageddon for another year, or six months, or three, when they can reach yet another triumphant deal to postpone it yet again. Harry Reid has already announced that he wants to raise the debt ceiling -- or, more accurately, lower the debt abyss -- by $2.4 trillion before the end of the year, and no doubt we can look forward to a spectacular “bipartisan” agreement on that, too. It took the government of the United States two centuries to rack up its first trillion dollars in debt. Now Washington piles on another trillion every nine months. Forward!#ad#

If you add up the total debt -- state, local, the works -- every man, woman, and child in this country owes 200 grand (which is rather more than the average Greek does). Every American family owes about three-quarters of a million bucks, or about the budget deficit of Liechtenstein, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world. Which means that HRH Prince Hans-Adam II can afford it rather more easily than Bud and Cindy at 27b Elm Street. In 2009, the Democrats became the first government in the history of the planet to establish annual trillion-dollar deficits as a permanent feature of life. Before the end of Obama’s second term, the federal debt alone will hit $20 trillion. That ought to have been the central fact of this election -- that Americans are the brokest brokey-broke losers who ever lived, and it’s time to do something about it.  

My Hillsdale College comrade Paul Rahe, while accepting much of my thesis, thought that, as an effete milquetoast pantywaist sissified foreigner, I had missed a vital distinction. As he saw it, you can take the boy out of Canada but you can’t take the Canada out of the boy. I had failed to appreciate that Americans were not Euro-Canadians, and would not go gently into the statist night. But, as I note in my book, “a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two.” Tuesday’s results demonstrate that, as a whole, the American electorate is trending very Euro-Canadian. True, you still have butch T-shirts -- “Don’t Tread On Me,” “These Colors Don’t Run”#...#In my own state, where the Democrats ran the board on election night, the “Live Free or Die” license plates look very nice when you see them all lined up in the parking lot of the Social Security office. But, in their view of the state and its largesse, there’s nothing very exceptional about Americans, except that they’re the last to get with the program. Barack Obama ran well to the left of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, and has been rewarded for it both by his party’s victory and by the reflex urgings of the usual GOP experts that the Republican party needs to “moderate” its brand.

I have no interest in the traditional straw clutching -- oh, it was the weak candidate#...#hard to knock off an incumbent#...#next time we’ll have a better GOTV operation in Colorado#...#I’m always struck, if one chances to be with a GOP insider when a new poll rolls off the wire, that their first reaction is to query whether it’s of “likely” voters or merely “registered” voters. As the consultant class knows, registered voters skew more Democrat than likely voters, and polls of “all adults” skew more Democrat still. Hence the preoccupation with turnout models. In other words, if America had compulsory voting as Australia does, the Republicans would lose every time. In Oz, there’s no turnout model, because everyone turns out. The turnout-model obsession is an implicit acknowledgment of an awkward truth -- that, outside the voting booth, the default setting of American society is ever more liberal and statist.

The short version of electoral cycles is as follows: The low-turnout midterms are fought in political terms, and thus Republicans do well and sometimes spectacularly well (1994, 2010); the higher-turnout presidential elections are fought in broader cultural terms, and Republicans do poorly, because they’ve ceded most of the cultural space to the other side. What’s more likely to determine the course of your nation’s destiny? A narrow focus on robocalls in selected Florida and New Hampshire counties every other fall? Or determining how all the great questions are framed from the classroom to the iPod to the movie screen in the 729 days between elections?

The good news is that reality (to use a quaint expression) doesn’t need to swing a couple of thousand soccer moms in northern Virginia. Reality doesn’t need to crack 270 in the Electoral College. Reality can get 1.3 percent of the popular vote and still trump everything else. In the course of his first term, Obama increased the federal debt by just shy of $6 trillion and in return grew the economy by $905 billion. So, as Lance Roberts at Street Talk Live pointed out, in order to generate every dollar of economic growth the United States had to borrow about five dollars and 60 cents. There’s no one out there on the planet -- whether it’s “the rich” or the Chinese -- who can afford to carry on bankrolling that rate of return. According to one CBO analysis, U.S.-government spending is sustainable as long as the rest of the world is prepared to sink 19 percent of its GDP into U.S. Treasury debt. We already know the answer to that: In order to avoid the public humiliation of a failed bond auction, the U.S. Treasury sells 70 percent of the debt it issues to the Federal Reserve -- which is to say the left hand of the U.S. government is borrowing money from the right hand of the U.S. government. It’s government as a Nigerian e-mail scam, with Ben Bernanke playing the role of the dictator’s widow with $4 trillion under her bed that she’s willing to wire to Timmy Geithner as soon as he sends her his bank-account details.

If that’s all a bit too technical, here’s the gist: There’s nothing holding the joint up.

So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

My Silver Lining

It's no secret Michele Bachmann was my primary pin-up back in those early, crowded presidential debates. In the tsunami of bad news, I am delighted that she won a tough race in Minnesota. She has her critics, but she is a courageous and principled fighter, and she gets the urgency of the crisis facing an ever broker America. I'm glad she'll be back in Congress, and I wish there were more like her.

Book Relaunch

I'm on with Dennis Miller right now, and he was kind enough to mention my book After America. Or, as Dennis retitled it, Wednesday.

P.S. In the week my book came out in hardback last year, America got downgraded and looters lit up London in a direct re-enactment of my Chapter Five. Given the coincidence of the new paperback edition and last night, this lady tweets:

The Moody's downgrade& riots in Britain&Middle East were one thing, but this? Publicity tie-ins 4 #AfterAmerica must end!

Les mots justes

I appreciate the sterling if pitiful efforts of my comrades to clutch at straws these last few hours, but, on this grim morning after, I fear the most salient analysis comes from Sir Richard Mottram, Her Britannic Majesty's former Permanent Secretary for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, albeit speaking in another context:

"We're all f***ed. I'm f***ed. You're f***ed. The whole department's f***ed. It's been the biggest c**k-up ever and we're all completely f***ed."

Words to ponder.

Live Free . . . Or Die

As disappointing for me as Mitt losing New Hampshire has been the down-ticket races in the Granite State. In 2010, Republicans won both House seats, the Senate seat, three-quarters of State Reps, 80 percent of State Senate seats, and 100 percent of the Executive Council. Two years later, Democrats have taken the governorship and may well take both House seats, and the vote tallies they're racking up in hardcore plaid-clad North Country towns far from the Massachusetts border are remarkable.

A lot of the telly chatter is about how Republicans don't get the shifting demographics: America is becoming more of a "brown country," as Kirsten Powers put it on Fox. But New Hampshire is overwhelmingly white -- and the GOP still blew it. The fact is a lot of pasty, Caucasian, non-immigrant Americans have also "shifted," and are very comfortable with Big Government, entitlements, micro-regulation, Obamacare and all the rest -- and not much concerned with how or if it's paid for.

If this is the way America wants to go off the cliff, so be it. But I wish we'd at least had a Big Picture election. The motto of the British SAS is "Who dares wins." The Republicans chose a different path. A play-it-safe don't-frighten-the-horses strategy may have had a certain logic, but it's unworthy of the times.

Exit Poll Greatest Hits

Here we go again. As I wrote here eight years ago:

C’mon, you guys. 57-41 in New Hampshire? I’ll buy you and Jonah a Connecticut River lake apiece if that pans out.

As for 60-40 in PA, much as I respect the ruthlessness of the Rendell machine, that’s as credible as Saddam’s last Presidential victory.

To the best of my knowledge, Rich and Jonah remain lakeless.

It Was the Best of Notch, It Was the Worst of Notch

Here's one for the psephological experts. Last time round, first-in-the-nation Dixville Notch, NH voted:

Obama 15, McCain 6

The 2012 results, announced moments ago, are:

Obama 5, Romney 5

So Obama's vote has fallen by two-thirds. Alternatively, Romney is doing worse than McCain - and turnout is way down.

(On that last point, I gather it's actually because the two biggest families in town moved out. Still...)